The Long Road from Mount Moriah to Mount Moriah: A Meditation on Kindness, Killing and the Voice of God

We are kind, yet we kill. This challenging essay speaks to the essences of kindness. It shows how we benefit as societies, and always have, from the simplest kindness in the marketplace as well as in the family. Yet societies come and go, as well may ours. The ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, integrated, make for a provocative insight into both ancient social conflict (looking to the Gnostics as an example) and a surprising exploration of our society's Christian and Jewish roots, evolving into modern thought and today's societies. Wittgenstein's "language games" and Popper's notion of falsification, taken together, shed light on how a nation, a sovereign, even leviathan, thrives (or fails). For only leviathan can kill justly, but kill it must ... yet how we speak, together, to sovereignty provides the only hope of just outcomes. And only a just sovereign can protect us in our speech, and the security that alone enables kindness and prosperity.